“Camping” in America has come to mean many things to many enthusiasts, and stakeholders include citizens, government, for-profit companies … and let’s not forget the needs of Mother Nature herself.
In one of my two earlier columns about American ideas on camping, I emphasize the complex interplay among recreational, functional and political camping.
No matter where one stands (or sleeps!), observing outdoor experiences through these three “camping” lenses inspires insight into this nation’s rapidly changing “social contract” with the outdoors, especially the ongoing crucial significance of “public nature” and who gets to enjoy it.
To remind us, Emilio Meinecke, a 1930s forestry biologist who invented the “loop campground” model, honestly believed that camping experiences in widely available government campgrounds would strengthen the bonds of loyalty between the government and the citizen — surely something we sorely need today.
By the 1970s, the public enthusiasm for longer hikes, backpacking and gnarly camping swept the country and created new definitions of camping on public lands.
A novel group of “workampers” tend to seek year-round employment as campground hosts, and I once dreamed of becoming the “camp host” at some remote site like my beloved Davy Brown Camp right next to our local San Rafael Wilderness.
Yet, we already find an ironic contradiction here, since workers like these camp hosts now labor largely for private concessionaires contracted to manage public lands.
This change has been manifested locally by U.S. Forest Service sub-contractor Parks Management Co., which runs many local federal campgrounds, doing a poor job at some of them.
This privatization means that the revenue and the profits are private, but all of the risks are socialized (4.1.1 Carswell).
We see a clear illustration of a shift in the sacred social contract — one arrives at a supposedly “public” campground like Nira Camp on the Manzana, but it’s managed by ghost “workampers” who only show up sporadically (the Forest Service never knows).
Are campers at Nira still “guests” of the nation and American citizens, or simply citizens of the State of Parks Management? How does Parks Management help build bonds between government and citizens?
The political aspect of public camping intensifies the debates over citizens sleeping rough on public land, as we noted at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment/protest.
That political camping protest followed up on earlier patriotic camp-outs, such as 1932’s controversial “Bonus Army” encampment in Washington, D.C.
Thousands of World War I veterans became outraged that their promised war bonuses had still not been paid — 14 years after the Great War had ended.
While President Herbert Hoover eventually had the U.S. Army (led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur) expel these veterans and their families from Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C., the Bonus Army gained significant public support and extended the logic of earlier forms of camping as a political vehicle.
It’s interesting that earlier so-called “bums and hoboes” of the Great Depression weren’t seen as a threat when sleeping rough individually, but once massed together, Hoover realized he had to get rid of them (4.1.1.).
Under President Franklin Roosevelt’s various federal programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, government-sponsored camping increased, and the New Deal really supported out-of-work (mostly white male) Americans.
I know that many of the very rough trail camps in the Los Padres National Forest were built by these men in the later 1930s. They received pennies per day but were out of the cities and achieved some self-respect as they built rugged campsites and lived in them, too.
I’ve used several of these sites myself, like Upper Bear Camp, which still has a bread oven from the 1930s, as well as several others. (Two-week maximum stay; no one ever checks, however.)
Again, in the realm of political camping, five years after Occupy, thousands of people from across the United States gathered and camped out in a concerted effort to halt the progress of the Dakota Access Pipeline (Bakken line).
Members from more than 100 Indigenous groups participated along with environmental activists. The more than 1,000-mile line crossed ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, desecrated sacred sites and threatened the water supply in North Dakota.
While this political camping echoed earlier encamped protests like Coxey’s Army (1894) and Occupy, these activists thoughtfully adopted a different stance as “protectors” rather than protesters.
These campers were defending an enduring community of people with a historical presence on the land against those (capitalists) who sought to develop it for gain (4.1.1.).
We observe intensification of the leisure/recreational camping ethos in ads like REI’s 2017 poster: “Let’s Camp: We MUST Camp.” Here, the retail giant presents “camping” as an actual human biological need, and heck, REI also claims marshmallows and sleeping bags are key aspects of the new “nature cure” for our bewildering epoch!
Of course, you best stop by REI to purchase one of its sleeping bags, or $38 hiking gloves, or other chic gear, too. (Disclosure: I’ve been an REI co-op member for more than 25 years.)
This is a real twist on the evolving social contract between camping citizens and public nature, but we’ve long known that late-stage capitalism can fetishize and misdirect any manner of social trends.
Despite my interest in Richard Louv’s “Last Child in the Woods” and “The Nature Principle,” and a long interview with him, we can see that myriad issues blossom from the enormous increase in camping and the utilization of “public nature.”
Many of these issues are beyond my pay grade and the scope of these columns.
Ultimately, as author Phoebe Young notes at the end of her intriguing book, “reliance on neoliberal and biological arguments risks an impoverished sense of public nature.”
When will the “nature cure” movement — of which I’ve been a part — see the outdoors as more than simply a place to regenerate and enjoy as individuals, critically important as these are?
How attentive are we to those who have been historically left out of recreational access in America? Why does the Los Padres National Forest have “land of many uses” as its motto when these uses include fossil fuel development and logging?
(Los Padres remains the only national forest in California with commercial petroleum reserves and with wells providing oil and gas for many years.)
Why isn’t this incredible natural region called “Condor National Forest” (thanks, Jack Elliott) or “Santa Barbara Chaparral Forest” or “Chumash National Forest” instead of being named after Spanish conquerors led by the Christian Padres (Jesuits, then Franciscans)?
4.1.1.
Cally Carswell, “The Privatization of Public Campground Management,” July 18, 2014. The Bonus Army veterans finally got their promised money in 1936 (18 years after World War I ended) when Congress voted right over President Roosevelt’s veto. The Dakota Access Pipeline protests eventually failed. In May 2017, oil flowed through the entire line. Phoebe Young, “Camping Grounds — Public Nature in American Life” (Oxford, 2021).
